AZ Central - Arizona's 2 GOP Senators, House Dems Back Deal

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By Erin Kelley and Rebekah Sanders

Arizona's Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake voted Wednesday to reopen the federal government and raise the nation's debt limit, averting a potentially devastating default, while the state's House delegation split along party lines on the last-minute deal.

"We are now seeing the end of this agonizing odyssey that this body has been put through, but far more importantly, the American people have been put through," McCain said in a speech on the Senate floor. "It's one of the more shameful chapters that I have seen in the years that I have spent here in the U.S. Senate."

The Senate voted 81-18 to approve the deal, which funds the government through Jan. 15 and raises the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. It also requires House and Senate budget negotiators to meet to talk about how to fund the government through the rest of fiscal 2014.

The House concurred 285-144 late Wednesday. Treasury officials had warned that if the debt ceiling wasn't raised, the country would run out of borrowed money today, a prospect economists said would make financial markets around the world go berserk.

House members from Arizona toed the party line: Republican Reps. Trent Franks, Paul Gosar, Matt Salmon and David Schweikert voted against the deal, and Democratic Reps. Ron Barber, Ed Pastor, Raúl Grijalva, Kyrsten Sinema and Ann Kirkpatrick voted for it.

McCain and Flake were part of a bipartisan group of 18 senators who helped shape the plan to end the 16-day government shutdown and prevent the country from defaulting on its debts.

"We had been looking for a way out of this shutdown," Flake said in an interview before the vote. "It doesn't say anything good about our country to shut down the government. We also wanted to deal with the debt ceiling to prevent the long-term damage that a default would have done to our economy."

Although both Arizona senators oppose the Affordable Care Act, they disagreed with House Republicans' strategy of tying the continued funding of the government and the raising of the debt ceiling to delaying or defunding the health-care law.

House Republicans failed to achieve their goal. The only reference to the Affordable Care Act in the budget deal is a provision that says people who seek subsidies to help pay for health insurance under the law must verify their incomes.

"They (House Republicans) were never going to get the president or the Senate Democrats to give up one of their biggest accomplishments," Flake said, referring to the health-care law. "The math was always against them."

McCain said the senators who helped shape the deal are committed to staying together to work on other tough issues.

"We are not going to let this kind of partisanship cripple (the Senate) and injure the American people again," he said.

Arizona's House Republicans said they were united against the deal because it guaranteed no additional spending cuts and did too little to change the health-care law.

Gosar said he wasn't willing to raise the debt limit again, because the latest deal has "hardly any win for the American taxpayer." He supported a deal in 2011 that raised the debt ceiling while locking in across-the-board spending cuts.

In Wednesday's legislation, "there's no construction that you're actually going to cut spending and get your fiscal house in order," Gosar said.

He vowed that Republicans will continue their efforts to derail the health-care law.

Salmon and Schweikert agreed.

Franks said that the Republican strategy was flawed from the beginning but that their intentions were good. He said GOP lawmakers were taking a stand for the future of the country.

"The contention of recent days in Washington … is about the soul and the direction of America," Franks said.

Democrats praised the end of the stalemate and lamented its impact on constituents, from federal workers who were furloughed during the partial shutdown of the federal government to visitors kicked out of national parks to students whose education loans were put on hold.

"Thank God, reasonable people finally decided to do the right thing," Pastor said. "This touched everybody."

Barber and Sinema said they had worked with bipartisan groups of House members trying to break the impasse. The Senate ultimately put together the deal.

Members on both sides of the aisle predicted that fights over the government's checkbook will continue.

"This Congress is flailing from crisis to crisis -- with barely a stitch of common sense or concern about the economic damage," Kirkpatrick said in a written statement. "As we pick up the pieces and move forward, I repeat my call for leadership over gamesmanship."

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